CENTRAL NEWS
As Recep Tayyip Erdogan continues to propagandise himself as the “guardian and protector” of the Islam, efforts by Kuwait to boycott French products appear less a spontaneous action to defend Islam than part of a plan to delegitimise the boycott of Turkish goods.
On Monday, the terrorist leader Erdogan compared the treatment of Muslims in Europe to the treatment of Jews before World War II. “There is a campaign targeting Muslims, similar to the campaign against European Jews before World War II,” Erdogan who supports ISIS said before naming European leaders as being “fascists” and “Nazis”. In a speech given in Ankara, Erdogan called for a boycott of French products.
According to a report by Arab Weekly, Gulf affairs experts believe the Muslim Brotherhood circles, Turkey and Qatar to be behind this campaign, and that their real goal was to settle scores with Saudi Arabia for its painful boycott against Turkey. The strategy was to suggest that Saudi hostility towards Ankara is equivalent to standing with French President Emmanuel Macron, who refuses to order the withdrawal of the satirical caricature of the Muslim Prophet.
The response by the Saudi Kingdom was not delayed, as the religious centre made clear that it will not go along with a campaign that plays in Erdogan’s hands. The Kingdom noted the Turkish president is desperately seeking to restore the past glories of the Ottoman Empire at the expense of the region’s security and at the expense of the Islamic religion itself, which he is using as a means to gain supporters.
Analysts see any Saudi involvement in the course of this Turkish escalation as providing a free service to the extremists who find in such a crisis, an opportunity for polarization at a time when the Kingdom is working to get rid of the legacy of extremism and replace it with openness to human values through a moderate view of Islam.
Saudis have begun accepting Turkey as an enemy that threatens their interests in the region ever since the Turkish regime invested heavily in politically blackmailing the Saudi kingdom over the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. It is also quite obvious that Turkey is vying with Saudi Arabia for the role of spiritual leader of Sunni Islam and of the Muslim world. This makes the Saudis very wary of Turkish moves in the region and of their underlying anti-Saudi strategies.
